Website

Search archives

Artist explores an age of transition in gallery exhibition '{seven}'

Feb. 25, 2014

Tina Tryforos explores an age of transition, 7, in her exhibition at the Knight Campus Art Gallery.

The Community College of Rhode Island Knight Campus Art Gallery is showing “{seven},” an exhibition by Rumford photographer Tina Tryforos, from Feb. 25 to March 27. An opening reception will be held from 5 to 7 p.m. on Thursday, Feb. 27.

Tryforos, an adjunct instructor in photography at the Flanagan Campus in Lincoln since September 2008, began this photographic series featuring 7-year-olds in 2009 after a conversation with a friend about making portraits that mark specific, notable times in children’s lives. Shortly after, her son, Eli, turned 7 and, she said, he quickly changed in noticeable ways. The age seemed a turning point, the first step out of childhood.

She notes in her artist statement that 7-year-olds are “full of charming, graceful ambiguity. The confidence of an older child overlays the innocence of a younger one as they make their way through the world, somewhere between small and big, dependent and independent, emotional and cerebral, unsure and confident. Imagination still looms large, but there is a new presence of logic and the desire to understand the world and one’s place in it.

She since has made portraits of more than 40 children, “documenting a wide range of personalities and moods across a group of individuals. In these pictures of middle childhood, there are already hints of these children as teens (along with traces of their younger selves). Shot on film in black and white and color, these photographs project the future while recording the fleeting present,” she wrote.

Tryforos received her Master of Fine Arts in visual studies at Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, N.Y., and her bachelor’s degree in art from Union College in Schenectady, N.Y.

The gallery is located in Room 3500, on the third floor of the round building at the Warwick campus, 400 East Ave. Gallery hours are from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday and 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. Thursday. For more information, email the gallery director.